Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

An exquisite, blistering debut novel...

Three brothers tear their way through childhood — smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn — he's Puerto Rican, she's white — and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.

Review:

"Some books quicken your pulse. Some slow it. Some burn you inside and send you tearing off to see who made this thing that can so burn you and quicken you and slow you all at the same time. A miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again." Dorothy Allison

Review:

"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It resembles no other book I've read. We should all be grateful for Justin Torres, a brilliant, ferocious new voice." Michael Cunningham

Review:

"We the Animals snatches the reader by the scruff of the heart, tight as teeth, and shakes back and forth — between the human and the animal, the housed and the feral, love and violence, mercy and wrath — and leaves him in the wilderness, ravished by its beauty." Paul Harding

Review:

"In language brilliant, poised, and pure, We the Animals tells about family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too many other needed things, about how precious it becomes, and about the joy and dread of realizing that there really is no end to it." Marilynne Robinson

Review:

Review:

Review:

"A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver's or Jeffrey Eugenides's voice did when we first heard it." Washington Post

Review:

"A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt." O, The Oprah Magazine

Review:

"The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel....A kind of incantation." The New Yorker

Synopsis:

We the Animals is a gorgeous, powerful novel that tears deep into the heart of family and launched Justin Torres straight into the spotlight, with a storm of praise from far and wide, including this from Esquire: "Justin Torres is about to be knighted. We the Animals . . . is the kind of book that makes a career."

Synopsis:

We the Animals has met with extraordinary acclaim, from writers like Michael Cunningham, Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, Dorothy Allison, and Tayari Jones, and publications like Forbes, the New York Times, People, and more. A novel with reach as well as power, it landed on national and regional bestseller lists and is poised to find an even larger audience in paperback.

This "fiery ode to boyhood" (Scott Simon, NPR) tracks three brothers as they tear their way through childhood, growing up in the shadow of Paps and Ma and learning a kind of love that is serious, dangerous, unshakeable, glorious. A stunning exploration of how we are formed by our earliest bonds, We the Animals bears witness to Justin Torres's serious talent and heralds him as a "brilliant, ferocious new voice" (Michael Cunningham).

About the Author

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He was the recipient of a Rol&oacute;n Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller; he is now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Average customer rating based on 2 comments:

Kebi, July 20, 2015 (view all comments by Kebi)
It’s a good thing this book is short, since I was holding my breath the whole time. Justin Torres's writing is simply brilliant. The Arkansas Times critic said it vividly, “…It feels like reading James Agee by lightning strike.” Oh, the many ways we survive our childhoods! Looking deeply into one of the ways it works becomes a personal experience that now belongs also to the reader. A moving coming-of-age story about three brothers and their parents immediately absorbs you into that family, dysfunctional, intense, close, full of love, bewilderment, pain, belongingness and rejection, it reads in places almost like a long poem. In fact, I read the first chapter aloud at a spoken word event because I think it IS a poem, and the rapt audience seemed not to breathe until I stopped.

On the other hand, it’s too bad this novel is short, because I felt that unique sense of loss you feel when you realize you will never again read a book for the first time. But I not only will read it again, I will read anything Justin Torres writes.

Kirsten Myers, January 1, 2013 (view all comments by Kirsten Myers)
The best book I read in 2012 even though it came out in 2011 - but the paperback came out in 2012. The prose was up there with Jeanette Winterson and absolutely fabulous.

"Review"
by Dorothy Allison,
"Some books quicken your pulse. Some slow it. Some burn you inside and send you tearing off to see who made this thing that can so burn you and quicken you and slow you all at the same time. A miracle in concentrated pages, you are going to read it again and again."

"Review"
by Michael Cunningham,
"We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It resembles no other book I've read. We should all be grateful for Justin Torres, a brilliant, ferocious new voice."

"Review"
by Paul Harding,
"We the Animals snatches the reader by the scruff of the heart, tight as teeth, and shakes back and forth — between the human and the animal, the housed and the feral, love and violence, mercy and wrath — and leaves him in the wilderness, ravished by its beauty."

"Review"
by Marilynne Robinson,
"In language brilliant, poised, and pure, We the Animals tells about family love as it is felt when it is frustrated or betrayed or made to stand in the place of too many other needed things, about how precious it becomes, and about the joy and dread of realizing that there really is no end to it."

"Review"
by Washington Post,
"A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver's or Jeffrey Eugenides's voice did when we first heard it."

"Review"
by O, The Oprah Magazine,
"A novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and to hurt."

"Review"
by The New Yorker,
"The communal howl of three young brothers sustains this sprint of a novel....A kind of incantation."

"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
We the Animals is a gorgeous, powerful novel that tears deep into the heart of family and launched Justin Torres straight into the spotlight, with a storm of praise from far and wide, including this from Esquire: "Justin Torres is about to be knighted. We the Animals . . . is the kind of book that makes a career."

"Synopsis"
by Firebrand,
We the Animals has met with extraordinary acclaim, from writers like Michael Cunningham, Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, Dorothy Allison, and Tayari Jones, and publications like Forbes, the New York Times, People, and more. A novel with reach as well as power, it landed on national and regional bestseller lists and is poised to find an even larger audience in paperback.

This "fiery ode to boyhood" (Scott Simon, NPR) tracks three brothers as they tear their way through childhood, growing up in the shadow of Paps and Ma and learning a kind of love that is serious, dangerous, unshakeable, glorious. A stunning exploration of how we are formed by our earliest bonds, We the Animals bears witness to Justin Torres's serious talent and heralds him as a "brilliant, ferocious new voice" (Michael Cunningham).

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